


Last of Kin

by RedHorse



Category: Outsiders (TV 2016)
Genre: Appalachia, Gen, Magical Realism, Mention of past deaths, Post-Apocalyptic, Post-Canon, Unreliable Narrator, invented spiritual symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-08-19
Packaged: 2020-09-07 19:13:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20314600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedHorse/pseuds/RedHorse
Summary: Abigail walked down the mountain the morning after her uncle died.





	Last of Kin

**Author's Note:**

  * For [autumn_fog](https://archiveofourown.org/users/autumn_fog/gifts).

> For stuffle! I wanted to write you a dark nature walk and then this kind of came to me and I went with it. I don't suppose you know the series but I wrote this to stand alone, and I hope it does!
> 
> For anyone else who somehow stumbles upon this, the work is inspired by canon themes but admittedly it's been a helluva long time since I saw the show. If you're a big fan, forgive me.

Abigail walked down the mountain the morning after her uncle died.

She took nothing but the outsiders’ book, the good slingshot, the plastic bottle full of water and her carved kin sigil. She walked down, down while the mountain breeze tugged at her, foretelling a long winter that she wouldn’t know, and after it, a spring where the land would all turn green over the bones of her mother and fa and her raising-fa. 

The wolves followed her. She didn’t look back at them, but she felt the smooth wood of her kin sigil on her breastbone.

By nightfall it was as though she hadn’t walked for a day. That was the mountain’s way, so she made her camp and thought about her uncle. She’d locked up the cabin so maybe the animals wouldn’t get to him at once. She should have dragged him out and burned him, or maybe burned the cabin with him laid out inside with a ripe apple in his hand, but maybe this way the mountain would let him go, too. She didn’t lay a fire, but still when the darkness closed in she could see two of the wolves, profiled in the shadows, fur crusted silver by the dull moonlight.

She dreamed of the moonshine harvest two summers before, how the clearing was full of singing and familiar faces, all her family and cousins, the full force of the Farrells calling out to the mountain and the mountain calling back. It was all so familiar that it was less a dream and more the recounting of a memory, like the mountain had stuck it in her head to turn her back. 

But when she woke, she remembered the rest, too. How a week later the first of the children fell ill, red-spotted and burning up. Her uncle carried her far out to the hunting cabin and kept her there six weeks, and when they went back they smelled the bodies from far off, the mountain wind twisting to give them warning. They were the only ones left.

When the sun cracked through the trees in the morning Abigail was up before the birds. She walked in the silent trees with her footfalls for company. Down the mountain, the wolves at her back.

The furthest down Abigail had been was the crest rock, which she reached the second day. It shouldn’t have been along her route, but that was the way of the mountain. She stood on the cliff’s edge and breathed in the scent of juniper and thought of her mother’s hand in her hair, telling her, so softly, that this was where she’d found Abigail’s fa’s bones.

Her mother had been round-bellied but still keeping the baby a secret. She’d picked up the long bones and seen where they were worn by the wolves’ teeth.  _ This is what happens when the mountain calls, and you ignore her _ , she’d told Abigail.

The crest rock jutted out and then fell away to nothing. At the bottom of the slope were young trees and, half-rotted, a deer carcass. Its body was a broken tangle. Why had nothing dragged it off to eat after it fell? Abigail touched the kin sigil.

Her uncle was the healer, born of the old Farrell line, cross-eyed and always hunched over his medicines and runes. He’d carved the wolf the night she was born, after they brought her, still wet and bawling, and put her in his mud-streaked hands. Wherever his fingers touched her the smudged mud made the shape of a wolf’s paws. 

_ The wolves will follow her _ he’d told Abigail’s mother and her raising-fa. And he was right. Her raising-fa told Abigail the story, over and over as she grew up, like there was a lesson in it. But it was a lesson Abigail was born knowing. The lesson of the mountain, the price of its silent call.

She levered herself over the edge of the crest rock and slid down, half-scrambling to slow her descent, somehow keeping her head up and her back scratched raw but laid against the slope as it shed rock and dirt, raised up in a cloud around her. She hit the bottom and smelled the rot of the deer carcass like a punch in the lungs. She looked up at the sky which was cloud-marbled above. A wolf leaned its head over the crest rock above her, its ears pricked, and she saw the gleam of its teeth.

From here she didn’t know the mountain trails or the pattern of its trees, the places where you could look close and see that the mountain had taken back a hunting cabin or a resting place. She wondered how long it would take for the mountain to close up all the places where the Farrells had opened her, breaking the rock, wearing away the grass, clearing the trees.

Her water was gone that night, and the wolves took up their barking howls at moonrise, an eerie chorus that kept her lying awake in the starlight. She held the outsiders’ book and remembered them coming out of the trees the winter before, carrying food. The outsiders who told her, when her uncle was out of hearing, that she could find them if she came down the mountain, and they’d make her one of their own.

On the cover of the book, so worn from daily handling that the paper was soft and the image was blurred, two children smiled with shining eyes. One of them had a net of silver metal on her teeth, the strangest jewelry Abigail had ever seen. The symbols below and inside made no sense to Abigail. Her fa had been one of the last readers. That art was lost to the Farrells when the wolves ate him up.

In the morning the land flattened and she reached the road. She thought it was her thirst fooling her when she caught sight of the endless smooth rock, but like the plastic bottle, it was another of the outsiders’ unnatural achievements. She was at the tree line and the mountain breathed behind her. She felt the warm furry pelt of a wolf on the back of her legs. She shuddered but didn’t look back, or down. Instead she stepped out onto the fine rock along the outsiders’ road, and then turned east.

She thought she’d smell their fuel, which she remembered from the years when the Farrell men were still alive and would go down on the four-wheelers to steal it for its power. She thought she’d hear them, the way you could always hear the Farrells when they all came together, only the stories told the outsiders were far vaster in number. But there was just quiet, the mountain’s shadow, and the heat rising off the road. She passed big metal shields with symbols that must have had a message, but they were also bent and weathered and riddled with holes. The outsiders were war-like, her mother had told her. If she’d had any choice, she never would have come to them. But what a Farrell was raised to know was that to be alone on the mountain was to die.

There was a barrier at the edge of the town and a man with a rifle. He wore strange clothes but he looked familiar, too, a hardness to him that a Farrell valued, three silver beads braided into his beard. He didn’t point the gun at her, but his posture told her she should stop walking, so she did.

“What’s your business around here?” His voice sounded strange but Abigail understood him.

“I’m looking for these folk,” Abigail said, slowly pulling out her book. He squinted at it, then crooked a finger at her, his other hand ready on his gun. She walked near enough she could toss it to him, and after he caught it he studied it with a frown.

“Child protective services?” he read aloud, and then he laughed darkly. He didn’t toss the book back. “That supposed to be a joke?” He looked her up and down. “What are you, twelve?”

He meant the summers she’d sweated through, she supposed, so she corrected him. “Thirteen.”

He snorted, then seemed to look her over again, more closely. The laughter cleared from his expression. “You a Farrell? From up the mountain?”

Abigail nodded cautiously. She didn’t say,  _ Yes, I’m the last _ .

He looked grimly amused once again. “Thought you were all dead. But if you’re not, I guess no one told you. The world ended down here. There ain’t no CPS. There ain’t nothing. You got somethin’ to sell? Because otherwise, you best walk on.”

She couldn’t track what he was saying, but she gestured for her book. He rolled his eyes and finally threw it back. She put it in her pocket and looked past him, up at the barrier, made of the shells of vehicles and balled-up wire. Beyond it were tall buildings, like her raising-fa had described to her from his stories of raids, and she saw the face of a child, just briefly, in one of the closest windows.

“Need water, then I can walk on,” she told the man. She understood barter, though it hadn’t a place when it was only she and her uncle. Before that even amongst the cousins there was no free-giving. She took out the slingshot and held it up with one hand, the plastic bottle in the other.

“Sure,” said the man, and he took them both from her and went away. She wondered if he’d come back, or keep it. The outsiders were thieves, which was why they’d deserved the raids. It was better she wouldn’t be made one of them, Abigail thought. She looked to the road. It stretched on and on, ‘til it curved out of sight. Somehow she itched to follow it.

The man came back carrying the bottle, filled up. But when he was a few steps away his eyes widened, fixed over her shoulder, and he grappled with his gun.

“Fuck,” he breathed a moment later. “Thought I saw a wolf.” He looked at Abigail and held the bottle toward her, frowning. “You’re sure it’s all right for you out there? You do look damn young.”

Abigail smiled at him and stowed her water. She was made of the mountain and older than the outsider could ever be. 

She walked up the road.


End file.
